Why do railroads in other countries so dramatically surpass those in the United States? America realized that too late, and tried to compensate by creating Amtrak. Amtrak is a sad political construct. From D. Track conditions really limit the speed of the trains in most places. There are perhaps parts of the West Coast and Midwest as well where passenger rail could be expanded.
The Europeans have invested in high-speed rail, but until now America has not been willing to do that. But Obama has announced a big rail program, and perhaps now that will be reversed in a very historic way, and maybe America will get the rail program it needs.
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Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again. Now Reading:. Membership My Account. Rewards for Good. Share with facebook. Share with twitter. Share with linkedin. Share using email. How did that happen? How quickly did all this occur? How did life change? How did people use their new freedom of movement? Both Ohio and Indiana built their own canal systems. They connected the Ohio River to Lake Erie. It helped the city of Chicago, Illinois, become the great transport hub of the Midwest.
Trains Travel Year-round The steam-powered locomotive had the most far-reaching impact. Trains were a heavy-duty, fast, year-round transport solution. In time, they became the preferred choice for commercial shipping. The earliest U. In , a group of Baltimore, Maryland, businessmen formed a corporation to build the first major railway. It ran between their city and the Ohio River. Many more private railway enterprises followed in the decades before the Civil War — Between and , the nation saw a ten-fold increase in the amount of track laid.
The first transcontinental line was established in Eventually, railways lowered the cost of transporting many kinds of goods across great distances. These advances in transport helped drive settlement in the western regions of North America.
They were also essential to the nation's industrialization. The resulting growth in productivity was astonishing. Busy transport links increased the growth of cities. The transportation system helped to build an industrial economy on a national scale. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.
Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. National Geographic Society. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.
If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Westward expansion and the growth of the United States during the 19th century sparked a need for a better transportation infrastructure.
Some 21, workers —from Irish-American Civil War veterans, freed slaves and Mormon pioneers to Chinese laborers —had been recruited to perform the hard and often dangerous work of laying the 1, miles of track.
While the railroad's construction was a mammoth undertaking, its effects on the country were equally profound. Here are some of the ways that the first transcontinental railroad—and the many other transcontinental lines that followed it—changed America. In addition to transporting western food crops and raw materials to East Coast markets and manufactured goods from East Coast cities to the West Coast, the railroad also facilitated international trade.
The first freight train to travel eastward from California carried a load of Japanese tea. Building of the Transcontinental Railroad, circa In the s, a six-month stagecoach trip across the U. But once the railroad was built, the cost of a coast-to-coast trip became 85 percent less expensive. That made it possible for Americans to visit distant locales that previously they might only have heard about.
Most of them eventually disappeared, but others, such as Laramie, Wyoming, evolved into towns that provided rail terminals and repair facilities.
Additionally, about 7, cities and towns across the country began as Union Pacific depots and water stops.
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